My name and so on. And I also forgot to put my name in my slot.
And I've come today to talk to you about the project that I manage.
So I'm talking from an operational frontline perspective,
which is in Rotherham and it's the Pathways Project and it's run by together for mental wellbeing.
We're a mental health charity and the oldest mental health charity in England
and also transition to adulthood and which we've heard a bit about already.
So why why are we in existence?
So the background to that is that, you know,
blowing out the candles on an 80th birthday cake does not magically transform anyone into a fully functioning,
mature adult, which is a relief to many of us.
And this is something that teachers I obviously very interested in,
and they are arguing for a distinct approach for young adults aged 18 to 24 within the criminal justice system.
Because of that fact, you don't suddenly become responsible and not impulsive, don't take any risks.
And that's simply backed up by the evidence we've seen about the age crime curve as well.
So that is the case for offending. But it's also the age that which person is most likely to desist from crime with the right support.
So with that in mind, two airlines have set up pilot projects that we're one of six and nationally and put together as
it's a mental health charity with the only one of those six that has a mental health slot as well.
So we're targeting 17 to 24 year olds and we chose 17 rather than 18 as a start to try
and get some people who might be making that transition from child to adult services.
So they should be at risk of or currently offending and or at risk of currently or currently overusing emergency services excuse me, mental distress.
So that can be anything. It doesn't need to be a diagnosis, quite a broad term and willing to engage with the support.
So it's nothing that can be statute truly of enforced.
So what we see every day, our clients have all of these things going on with them, so that's okay.
Much of what we've heard already.
So they have had a childhood characterised by trauma, often being many different types of abuse or neglect as intergenerational exclusion plays.
So, you know, families have been experiencing this for a long time.
Substance misuse issues, offending behaviour, homelessness, poor educational attainment.
And all of this is usually in the context of either mental illness or distress autism, ADHD and learning disability.
So the aims of our project that the obvious one is to reduce the police or emergency service contact.
So that could be either people being arrested, it could be them making calls, as, you know, victims of crime.
Because what we realised quite early on is we're looking at both victims and perpetrators and we would also like to work with wherever possible,
like probation officers who, you know, to work with them when they're doing pre-sentence reports, for example,
or solicitors to provide the right information about people's diagnoses and needs in relation to their funding for the individual.
We want to increase their wellbeing and resilience and a lot of people, you know,
they haven't had the kind of environments where they've been able to develop coping skills or learn from the caregivers.
So that's a really important piece of work. We want to reduce exclusion from networks,
communities and services because these are people who are and multiply disadvantaged in this area because of their needs.
They are very complex and can be problematic to engage with and to keep in services
so they fall through the gaps every time the staff there for working with them.
I find that very difficult because they don't fit into those neat little boxes I've been provided by services as.
But again, as we've heard, you know, you have this diagnosis, you have that need.
They're coming with a range of needs and often they might not be meeting the thresholds for particular things,
but there's such a lot of things going on that they're in absolute chaos.
And you just know that if left, they will eventually meet a threshold by which time there's been plenty of missed opportunities to intervene.
So one of the things that we like to offer and with any other staff,
this involved with a client we're working with is training around and working collaboratively with problematic or challenging behaviour.
So providing strategies and techniques so it's involving the client in their own sort of management of their
behaviour whilst also keeping boundaries but trying to move away from punitive approaches whenever possible.
So we hope to improve responses locally by doing that,
but also feed into strategic responses locally because we have a project board made up of senior staff from police, mental health and local authority,
and our clients are able to either attend that meeting to talk about anything from their experiences with us,
with other services and what it's like to be in person, arrested, all those kind of things.
And so they can even attend, say, themselves, or we have a system where we collect feedback, you know,
any kind of feedback from really small and opinions about where they'd like to be seen for an appointment to right up to the larger issues.
So we offer a 12 month intervention. And that's something that we started off saying three months, six months,
ended up at 12 months because we realise it takes a lot of time just to build a relationship and build that trust,
which Sarah was speaking about this this morning. They don't have you know, they are used to people flitting in and out of their lives.
And so that's really important. And also to not rush in with the questions, the heavy questions about, you know,
what's been going on in their life and what should we do less rushing with a plan because that just doesn't work.
And that 12 months is pretty flexible, we'll say.
We've got one client who's been with us for about about 20 months now because during that time we were working with her,
she became pregnant, exhausted, couldn't couldn't just discharge her.
And so that allows us to to respond individually to people's needs and take place in the client's preferred environment.
Again, it's quite simple thing, but so many services invite people to come to their building.
It doesn't matter how far away they are. They have the money to get the bus there, you know, do they have a choice in the time or the date?
And very often that leaves people not coming to their appointment.
So that's another missed opportunity.
So we quickly realised people like to be seen at home, mainly as mentioned, would take time to build that very relationship,
which in many services is not just through resource and financial constraints is just not possible.
And before rushing into the work, we offer client centred support.
So we identify people using a bespoke tool about the three hardest things that they've
identified and what that would look like if they would begin to start working on those things.
And what might their life look if they were without those problems.
And we've also had training recently from the multi systemic therapy team in Sheffield around work and the family.
So we've shared goal setting and bringing in the family to help people achieve their goals.
So psychologically informed supports.
What does that mean exactly? So we use a therapeutic relationship as the most important means of learning and facilitating change with the client.
And because people may not have had a healthy relationship to to work out those things from being younger, they may not have had those role models.
You know, it's so important for us, first and foremost,
to create a safe space environment where we can be really honest and say, you know, how is that working when you do this?
How does that make me feel and vice versa?
Is there anything we could do differently? And obviously, there's always hiccups in any relationships.
And, you know, the professional relationship is is not immune to that.
So we use those hiccups and those problems as learning events and kind of celebrate that and,
you know, say we're here alongside you, so let's do it together.
And we try and frame people's difficulties from a strength and resilience perspective.
So that means that they're viewing it in a way. So you can overcome this.
You have these tools, you have this already there, which sounds again obvious, but is so often not the case.
And then once we sort of practice them within our own relationship, we'll start to say, well, let's extend that to everyday life situations.
So, you know, with your parents or with your friend, with your probation officer, whoever it is.
So that is generalising the learning and also just reflecting at the end of every session, increasing self-awareness,
the ability to think about impact on others and to be more aware of what they have been learning, what those skills are.
And as I mentioned, so contracting around challenging or problematic behaviour.
So asking the person what problems do you think might likely come up and you know what has been a problem before?
Do you get angry? If so, you know, how should we deal with that if that comes up, you know,
would you like to leave the room for 5 minutes or would you like to go away and come back another day?
That sort of thing? Now because most people find it quite difficult to sit and just talk for an hour or whatever,
or just be face to face chatting about these kind of issues. We do a lot of this kind of alongside the practical stuff.
So, you know, obviously all the things that are going on elsewhere in their lives that might be going along to important appointments,
supporting through the police and court process and assisting with issues around housing,
debt benefits, employment and training, linking in with community resources and a lot of advocating on its behalf with other agencies.
A lot. And we're quite lucky.
We've got really good partnership working in place from the office that we had as the district commander of Rover and police and on board.
And it was through meeting with him and somebody together that this project got off the ground.
So he was instrumental in setting that up locally.
As mentioned by the Academy, Trust gave us a lot of funding to set the project up.
We also have funding from the CCG and the South Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner and we have
office space given to us by the local council and we're co-located with the Vulnerable Persons Unit,
which is a police department, which again is really helpful and just giving those links to,
you know,
staff and also information and some of the feedback that we've had from and other professionals are working with clients that we share have said,
you know, that really helps us to gain better access to agencies like the police and the local NHS Mental Health Trust because of our own links.
And we will be evaluated at the end of our three years by Sheffield Hallam sense of community justice.
And that initial interim data is looking quite positive.
Arrests and police contact is down. We are seeing is a rate of a rise in reporting of an instance as a victim.
However, I think that's probably more hopefully a positive thing and that people are gaining more
confidence in being able to report what's happening to them where perhaps they hadn't before,
and also self-reported increases in wellbeing and other sort of positive feedback from the
partners and stakeholders as well about our involvement in websites and further information.
Thank you.